Hydrogen is considered as one of the most promising future energy carriers due to its noteworthy advantages of renewable, environmentally friendly and high calorific value. However, the low density of hydrogen makes its storage an urgent technical problem for hydrogen energy development. Compared with the density of gas hydrogen, the density of liquid hydrogen is more than 1.5 times higher. Liquid hydrogen is thus more advantageous for large-scale storage and transportation. However, due to the large difference between the liquid hydrogen temperature and the environment temperature, an inevitable heat leak into the storage tanks of liquid hydrogen occurs, causing boil-off losses and vent of hydrogen gas. Researches on insulation materials for liquid hydrogen are actively being conducted, but research on support design for minimal heat transfer and enhanced rigidity remains insufficient. In this study, to design support for liquid hydrogen storage tank, technique of thermal-structural coupled analysis including geometry, mesh, and boundary condition were developed using Ansys workbench, and equivalent stress and deformation distributions were analyzed.

Decarbonization plays an important role in future energy systems for establishing a zero-carbon society. Hydrogen is believed to be a promising energy source that can be converted, stored, and utilized efficiently, leading to a broad range of possibilities for future applications. Hydrogen can be stored in various forms, including compressed gas, liquid hydrogen, hydrides, adsorbed hydrogen. Among these, liquid hydrogen has high gravimetric and volumetric hydrogen densities. There are a lot of previous studies on thermal behavior of MLI and VCS and optimization insulation system, but research on the insulation performance by varying the head shape of the tank has not been conducted. In this study, thermal-structural coupled analysis was conducted on the insulation system with VCS positioned between two layers of MLI for a liquid hydrogen storage tank. The analysis considered dome shapes (torispherical, circle, ellipses), and heat flux and temperature were derived from thermal analysis to predict insulation performance. Maximum equivalent stress and deformation were calculated from the structural analysis, and the optimal dome shape was proposed.